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Jun 19, 2023
This is utter trash, torturing people is apparently entirely fine behavior according to the author, someone can just torture a women into loving them and its not even seen as abusive behavior according to the story, its just supposed to be accepted. I don't usually read stories that make me want to evoke so much violence on every single character and the author themselves, and not even because any of the characters are interesting or well written, so you don't even get that. This is not a psychological story, this is not a thriller, this is not a romance story, this is an endurance test,
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and a crappy one at that, the art isn't even that good and the writer isn't even halfway original. If this is supposed to be Stockholm bait for old stupid lonely spinsters, I'd imagine even they aren't this desperate. The synopsis is a complete lie at the end, since aside from the fact its not love, its literally just about some nutjob torturing a woman until she's obsessed and because she's so needy and lonely (because he keeps isolating her from everyone that could even be her friend or could help her) he becomes the only thing she can rely on. I swear to God is I could put the author's head on a pike I would if they think this is acceptable behavior or can even be called "love". (not that anyone knows what that means anyway, but even the twisted crap we call it now would say this crap is too far) I am especially appalled that they bring up faith and some kind of "Bible" in the story and not a single piece of crap even considers this morally reprehensible, everyone is just obsessed with saying the ML is so great when he's a complete and utter psychopath. We go through much of the story with the FL wanting to kill the ML for torturing her, instead of killing herself because she literally has nothing to live for, her life is completely and utterly worthless and it would've been more realistic for her just to murder a bunch of random soldiers in a murder suicide attempt, least then this might've been interesting. But nah the writer must have some absolutely messed up and has to be getting off to some really special form of BDSM in order to write this tripe.
I would not recommend reading this, I barely could get past the first 19 chapters and skimmed the rest, and it only goes down from here, stay away.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Dec 2, 2022
Interesting premise the first show brought, and it was brought to an interesting sense of stalemate in the Pyscho-Pass 2. But with this film the cracks in philosophy and values are starting to feel more glaring and obvious. While enjoyable especially with a reoccurring favorite character, the narrative isn't exactly bad, but the logic and reason in the series is becoming more nonsense and it refuses to acknowledge these issues in the story. Foremost got to say this is a recommend watching as its definitely entertaining.
Now with all that said, I'll put my cards on table just so everything said will make more sense: The
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politics of the story are quite disturbed. If that's the point though why do all the violators have to be murderous psychos? Even more why is there no avatar for these questions that actually makes any sense. Akane is not an avatar for the audience because she believes hypocritically in system of "justice" yet isn't willing to question the system over practical reasons even if it violates "justice". (not that she even knows what that means given "just" arbitration for her is deciding who has the right to live outside a mental institution but still in a prison) While interesting to see a quasi-technocratic society deciding who is and isn't of value and how it fails, the unfortunate fact of the story, and the one for which I am most deeply perturbed by, is the lack of acknowledging what this system is really doing to people. Beyond sterilizing them and indoctrinating them, deciding who lives well, who lives in a mental institution, and who dies, its also manipulating and controlling everyone and willfully putting lives at risk all for the sake of its own ego, claiming it has none. It has been continually demonstrated however that this premise itself is false and nobody questions its. Akane does not question the "system" at all despite the fact that its determinedly callous with human life so long as it achieves its selfish goals.
The logical reasoning in the show is starting to break down, not that the dystopian setting had much to begin with as no dystopia is logical, its the logical conclusion of a fool's ideology after all which usually the writer was well aware of in writing the story. But the lack of an actual representative of liberty in the show when its also shown that its not a classical tragic dystopia like Orwell or Huxley is quite frustrating. Having antagonists or villains that act like they represent this doesn't help when they don't actually represent those positions at all. Even if the "the show must go on" paradigm prevents any resolution from ever being reached, it starting to feel as though the franchise is losing its grip on the intelligence it once had, that its only value is saying "this is bad" and not demonstrating that there even can be alternatives, it might as well being saying this is the best we can do then and that's not a good message.
Not to mention the communist principals of the story don't seem to be on their way to resolving and neither to demonstrate an unrepentant evil.
The story itself is otherwise well done, the characters fit pretty well, they're certainly entertaining and feel mostly realistic and grounded, though I have to question a few characters:
Why Kougami is still cool with Sybil given it is directly responsible for getting so many of his friends killed. Kougami would only make sense at this point if he was actually skeptical and despised Sybil, even in not understanding how the system works there is no reason he should be cool with it taking over the country he's exiled to, especially when said system is going to try to kill him once its implemented in that country.
Why is Akane also still fine with Sybil? It has directly put people in harms way, gotten people killed and maimed, elevated the position of a psychopath, all in only so as to build a world for it to perform world domination that it claims it does not lust after for which immediately after saying such contradicts itself and says that's what its trying to achieve. Its bad enough that Akane believes in the fallacy that is the social contract theory, but then in complete contradiction to her actual belief she doesn't question the Sybil System at all for directly claiming to seek world domination. Remember that the only reason she is unwilling to stop the Sybil System in Japan is because it would kill too many people in the short term in her opinion, an issue that happens regardless of Sybil in the Southeast Asian Union. There is no reason for her to argue that a vote for Sybil should even be held. Not to mention that from her perspective an election for Sybil makes no sense specifically because the voters can't even be informed so if you think the social contract is correct as she does she just advised its own violation anyway. The only logical position her character should be in is outright opposition to Sybil by the end, its already shown it can't be trusted and its neither reasonable nor logical and only exists to dominate the world and yet she, or more clearly, the writer, is unwilling to acknowledge the violation this presents. It really feels like the only reason this happened is specifically because they need to make more money, not because its a natural progression of the premise, it sounds like lazy writing.
As for the rest of the story, nobody else really acts out of place, outside of the lack of the questioning presented regarding Sybil's actions. Sybil's actual behavior for domination and preservation makes sense and even somewhat entertaining to note. Its quite reasonable to expect that this is how a multi-brain quasi-supercomputer would act in this circumstance, though the writer really needs to show somehow that Sybil has superior alternatives, as a result of this failure in writing so far its harming the story.
As for art, sound, music, and animation, its quite high quality and very watchable and enjoyable, if you don't care about the reason behind the world or the politics feeding into the story you can definitely find a lot to enjoy here though this does not feel like the type of story you should be vegging out to and a more consistent position would say this story is too deep to get as much enjoyment out of by not paying attention to its themes. Even if so far the themes of the franchise I find as questionable, least in execution if it intends to describe this world as drab as the art implies.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Nov 30, 2022
Chalk another up to the "cute anime girls doing outrageous nonsense" books. On this episode we have a mix of Minority Report and a generic buddy action schlock with generic archetypes. Quite bland, boring, and generic.
The basic premise is a seemingly near future Japan, but instead of it being peaceful because of socio-cultural reasons and comfortable luxury in a homogeneous culture, Japan's peace is a facade brought about by a secret supra-government organization that precrimes criminals with fifteen year old anime girl orphans (I think? They could just as well have been stolen and the story would not care) who are raised to kill said
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criminals. The precrime is a core element of how they work in the shaodws however hence why I compare it to Minority Report, however without any awareness regarding precrime as is common with most of these type of stories in Japan, especially from studios like A1. They don't consider the implications of their premise at all and everything as a result is just surface deep, deep as a puddle and smaller then a bathtub.
The story itself focuses on its buddy action archetypes who are members of this covert secret agent job, those who perform this job are called Lycoris. Chisato and Takina are the main duo of the story that it expects the audience to be interested in, though why is itself a mystery. It seems to expect that just because they are young attractive anime girls, that aside from almost all Lycoris being ruthless cold-blooded killers, that should be enough to interest you in them. However they are very bland and follow their generic archetypes with nearly no divergences.
Takina is the classic callous straight man archetype that grows a heart, something seen a million times before. She is never actually well-rounded and the story focuses on her shallow and basic evolution being important despite amounting to functionally nothing. On the other hand Chisato seems to be treated as the core inversion, the one we're supposed to look up to in the story and get interested in, she's bubbly and peppy and acting completely unaware of her actual job and purpose. Normally she'd be the experienced and grizzled veteran who is reluctantly treated as the number one of the Lycoris. And while part of that is true its not entirely, while she is experienced, Chisato neither acts grizzled or serious being the foil to Takina's always serious and callous nature. Perhaps you'd like to ask why and how did she turn out like that? Why is she number one? Well the story never answers these questions and doesn't believe you'll ever consider them either. And the story never gives you a reason for why the organization is so reluctant with her. In any case that's all Chisato has going for her, the entire purpose of her role is to invert the audience's expectations and never actually evolve past her position when Takina first met her. She's very one note only exceptional for being out of place for no reason.
Takina being the straight man thus puts her in the position of being the evolving character while the ever consistent and peppy Chisato is pulling her around and making her experience the world so she evolves. Unfortunately the narrative did nothing new with either of them and the story basically ends with everyone but Takina right back at where they started having not evolved at all. Takina is the only one for which anything about her has changed and she only changed because she had to strictly follow her archetype.
There's no problem with this cliche if the writers did something interesting with anyone but instead it was just bland and boring. Chisato is also quite a Mary Sue for most of the story, she never really fails, she can dodge bullets, she's almost always in a good mood, she's well loved and kind to everyone, shes better then everyone else in combat, and is never willing to kill anyone. And the story neither questions any of her precepts nor does it make her contend with them, at the end it almost requires her to finally kill someone but then it removes all the tension so she never has to compromise her made up morality which turned out to be her making assumptions that she still never bothers to question either. Its also implied that at one time she would've killed had she known that assumption was when her life was saved but the story constantly points out how that would've never happened either so it just makes Chisato arbitrarily look like a liar.
Anyway as a result of reverting the question of her precepts just as she's about to suffer for her arbitrary morals the writer rips the rug out from under the feet of the audience and reverts literally everything of consequence. And not just of Chisato but of the whole story. Chisato has to choose to save her friend or kill a pyschopath who once saved her life? Nope, she is not responsible and escapes the situation without ever being responsible for killing anyone. Lycoris gets exposed to the whole of Japan with regular civilians being shot and even killed alongside a few Lycoris out in the open because the civilians accidentally handled a gun? Nope, it was all a very realistic prank that nobody questions in complete disregard to the blood and corpses. The Lycoris needs to be eliminated for being exposed? Once again nope, they are saved by turning on the precime AI just in time which basically rewrites all of reality to hide their existence once again. Chisato is about to die because her techno-heart was shortcircuted and thus can't be recharged nor replaced because she wasn't willing to kill anyone? Nope, the heart was retrieved after someone else killed the guy giving her the ultimatum just so she can live a long and happy life without questioning how that happened. The whole story is based on the premise of no lasting consequences. Why they'd revert all this is itself questionable since this story won't go anywhere else, it more or less ends here already, nothing will be as popular as the anime either.
It especially was boring since everything the writer portrayed in the story suggests this precrime facade is a good thing and only bad people want to overthrow the facade. Never mind that its a very basic dystopian premise, nobody cares about that, better to live in a fake reality sheltered by magical anime girls. As a result the villains ended up being more charismatic and that makes them more compelling to root for even when its obvious they'll never be allowed to win because despite being a deary concept we have cute anime girls so its bright and cheery and happy. The story even acknowledges the facade problem directly with the main antagonist in the second half of the anime but he ends up being all talk and no bite even when he wins, again nothing he said came of any consequence in the narrative basically telling you the only reason he did what he did is just because he's a masochist claiming to have higher ideals.
So not only does the story cheat itself out of any value and revert any interesting result but it also hides it all in dissonance with its premise behind cute anime girls and colorful art and the whole of the narrative thus feels wrong.
As for other aspects like art and sound, its not bad but neither is it outstanding or revolutionary, the art and characters themselves are also quite dissonant from the setting, its definitely not unwatchably cheap but it feels like everything else A1 puts out, decent enough to watch until you understand what its saying. While there are plenty of good A1 productions, this definitely is not one to look for, it doesn't say anything interesting, if anything its got a lot of disturbed messaging and subtext (likely unintended) and there is nothing of value to the narrative.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Apr 18, 2021
Campione is an interesting show, it reaches a fair level for story that doesn't care to investigate itself itself all that deeply. And perhaps that's to be expected of the romance harem ecchi realm it resides in, to not be taken all that seriously. Unfortunately it set its initial expectations too high and somewhat deceives you into thinking it will do more then it actually does.
Lets start with the plot and narrative of the story: Its not all that much to write home about. Its a common cliche hero's journey generally. The only major distinguishing feature is through most of the show (aside from building
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the harem) he doesn't really want to be special nor act all that uptight about being a chosen one, but unfortunately that also leaves the main protagonist as rather incapable of much character development. We basically expect him to already be mostly perfect in character, and nothing really redefines him. Who he starts at is most of what he'll stay as. Be prepared if you're fine with a somewhat shonen-esque action narrative and very little development because aside from the ecchi, that's most of what you get and there isn't all that much else.
For art: Its alright for this type of show, I wouldn't praise it as all that special, but then I also don't have much of an eye for art in most cases, so take my opinions on the art with a grain of salt.
For sound: Soundtrack is alright, fits well and doesn't conflict with the action and narrative, although nothing about it pops out, other then that nothing is out of place as far as sounds in the show, it all works fine enough to immerse you.
Next to characters: This is probably the biggest letdown. My usual expectation for a story that fits in a harem protagonist is that the girls are either interesting, deep, or to be well developed. (if not also the protagonist himself) This is usually the bread and butter of most harem stories that present themselves as actual cohesive narratives. The unfortunate thing about Campione is it does not do this. There are mainly four girls in the harem by the endpoint in the story:
There's the obvious main girl who we meet in the first few minutes and sticks around the whole time. There isn't all that much interesting about her. Initially I was thinking, based on how she's introduced and the initial interactions with the protagonist, that she wouldn't immediately fall in love with him and would follow a path of realizing her feelings or such as the show went on, one of those classic main girl syndrome type of deal. That's not really what happens, she instead falls in love with him somehow in the first episode. (not that I can really see it even when it tells me where, how, and why) Given what happened in the first episode I became immediately confused why she was all over the protagonist because there is no transition to it, she's presented like that without context or reason. (when originally in the first episode she was really mad at him for cliche ecchi reasons) As a result she becomes in my opinion quite annoying, which doesn't help when she also acts fairly smug making me start to wish, even just a little, that she'd eat dirt and be humbled. She also does not evolve as a character at all after the first episode, which is made worse when its expected that you accept that she loves the main protagonist without question which to my eyes was quite suspicious and I thought was gonna make her deeper then that. But to no avail.
The next girl doesn't require nearly as much to cover as she's a standard shy girl archetype, she isn't exactly open about what she wants and in this case neither is able to do all that much actione-wise. There isn't all that much to say about her as she just follows the standard shy girl archetype to a tee. In her case she probably gets the most actual development over the whole of the show compared to the other girls, but unfortunately its the cliche type of development for that archetype, being the "coming out of the shell a bit" development. Only major character trait outside the archetype is her being bad with technology, which is handled as a one-off throwaway joke anyway and not really worth mention.
The third girl we meet is in my opinion probably the most interesting as she at least has a complex and more defined character then everyone else. She also has a personal hobby that continually reoccurs in the story and speaks to actually being the deepest of the characters had it been better exploited. She also gets pretty good character development, nearly rivaling the previous girl, however reason I say this one is less developed mostly because of her short-lived characterization in comparison and how quickly the characterization is resolved. How I'd define her character mostly is innocently naive and extremely loyal, one of her biggest traits is how she doesn't actually understand her own motivations as part of the harem, which isn't developed on all that much, least not after the point where she develops feelings for the protagonist.
Last girl doesn't even really show up until the last few episodes and she isn't really characterized all that well, if at all. There isn't much to regard on her and a good chunk of her screen time is devoted to making her a puppet of an antagonist anyway. That's about all there is to say about her, she doesn't change.
For all the other characters that we see, they service their role fine, I wouldn't expect much development from secondary characters and for the most part that's how it functions, there aren't any real standout characters from a development view and we don't get any time with much of them.
As for enjoyment: I found show enjoyable to watch up to the end, but even then I can't help but rate it low since it seems to expect you don't think about what you're watching while also presenting a rather high level investigation of its main topic, that being a bunch of mythological gods and their background and history. (including how they were developed) The show really does not pace its expectations with its characters, but the narrative itself does most of what you're expecting it to that aside, though the characters are left feeling unfinished.
Overall I enjoyed the show while watching it, but was getting annoyed at the characters and their lack of development for the most part and the expectation to not think too much. These type of shows don't need a big twist even in the characters, but if its gonna be a decent romance, (even as a harem romance) you really should expect the romance to seem natural or make some semblance of sense, this show is not that unique just because of its action and subject matter. If you're fine with no thought action romance fantasy or without much character evolution then this show has got you covered, but if you actually enjoy developing romances and interesting harem girls, you probably should move.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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